Fields in flux

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Notes

1. Aside from brief mention here, engagement with Derrida's “animot” writings will be deferred until some other occasion. In addition to articles by the philosopher already cited, another relevant contribution includes an interview conducted by Jean-Luc Nancy: “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida” in Who Comes after the Subject?

2. Like that on animals, the literature on Joseph Beuys is enormous and continues to grow. Aside from books already cited, additional sources include Alain Borer, The Essential Joseph Beuys; Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly, Joseph Beuys, Arena; Pamela Kort, Rodin Beuys; and Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose, Thinking is Form.

3. While animal discourse remains immense, it has become increasingly insistent as well as widely distributed through nearly every field of scholarship. Significant have been its turns through cultural studies, philosophy, ethics, sociology, anthropology, medicine, law, and politics, not to mention biology. In addition to Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, Cary Wolfe's collection Zoontologies offers an intriguing array of approaches including a piece by Derrida entitled “And Say the Animal Responded?,” and another by Baker called “Sloughing the Human.” Equally valuable is Cary Wolfe's book Animal Rites and the groundbreaking work of Donna Haraway, both Primate Visions and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Furthermore, see also David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous; Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee; Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman, Concrete Jungle; Erica Fudge, Animal; Peter Hoeg, The Woman and the Ape; Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison; Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf; Barbara Noske, Beyond Boundaries; Rob Preece, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb; Marketta Seppälä, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub, Animal. Anima. Animus; and, finally, Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel, Animal Geographies.

4. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. However relevant here, I make no pretense to address other books by the philosopher-psychoanalyst team, such as What is Philosophy? and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, or by Deleuze alone, such as Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Nor do I take up the voluminous body of secondary literature including by the likes of Alain Badiou, Ronald Bogue, Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, John Rajchman, and others.

5. For a brilliant consideration of Beuys, the focus of at least one chapter, along with other contemporary artists, as well as with implications both for “becoming animal” and the culture of disease, and with particular focus on a sociohistorical consideration of the American coyote, see David Levi Strauss, between dog and wolf.